I've been a mythtv user for 3 years so maybe I can help you out on this one since linux mce uses mythtv or vdr. I've had no problems playing .iso and .mdf files on mythtv. Mythtv uses mplayer by default for videos and xine for dvd disks. I hope this helps.

If you rip the dvd in LMCE it creates a filename.dvd file and also a filename.id3. The .dvd is an iso image. The .id3 contains the meta data, chapter names, actors, genres, cover art, etc. (it gets this automatically).

If you have already ripped dvd's, just rename them to .dvd and lmce will play them. Most Linux dvd rippers don't look up the dvd's cover art and meta data, so you might not have this. In this case, go into lmce's admin panel choose Files & media, cover art. It will scan amazon using the filenames as keywords, adn then give you matrix to pick the cover art that matches each dvd, and it will automatically pull the actors/genres/etc. so it catalogs them.

Could you please show me how to get LinuxMCE to recognize a VIDEO_TS directory? I couldn't get it to work no matter what I select as the Media (DVD, LinuxMCE DVD, LinuxMCE VideoFile....) in the Pluto-admin.

you have to convert the dvd directory to a image file, like an iso, but with .dvd extension. mkisofs can help you to do this. the command should be something like mkisofs -o name_of_file.dvd directory_of_dvd/

Thanks for the reply. I thought it could recognize a VIDEO_TS directly because it is using xine as the player which works if I point it to the VIDEO_TS directory. Is there a reason why it won't work? Does anyone know where the script is for playing the DVD? I might be able to fix it. Thanks in advance.

There is no such script - the playback is done by 'Xine_Player' which is LMCE application (DCE device) that is built using xine-lib library for playback. One of the reasons why LMCE doesn't support playback of copied 'VIDEO_TS' folder is that in this case UpdateMedia files watching app would scan all files inside and mark them as separate media file - definitely not the result you want

I would suggest you to convert the VIDEO_TS folder into one .dvd file as it was described above.

It may be true that LinuxMCE will rip the id3 tag from a DVD for you. However, most DVD rippers do not offer this function. In fact, unlike MP3s, I cannot seem to find where this meta data goes. Right clikcing on the file properties of a video_ts.ifo does no good.

Basically, I don't know of a way to get the id3 tag info from a DVD. With the actual DVD in the drive, this info displays automatically. When the DVD is loaded from the hard drive, this info does not display. Before I build too large of a collection, can someone help me resolve this?

Actually it does playback folders of video_ts files, or at least used to. I haven't tested it in a long time. UpdateMedia has some hardcoded logic to treat a video_ts folder as a single piece of media.

I'm having a problem ripping a particular dvd via LMCE (Pirates Carribean Dead Mans Chest). Presumibly this is due to the dummy sectors which cause ripping software to report an I/O error. It gets about 10% into the rip and fails. As a work-around I ripped it on my Vista PC using Ripit4me -> DVDecryptor -> DVD Shrink (just to reduce the size). This created the normal AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders which I then copied over to the CORE. However, LMCE never saw it under Videos. So then I went to Files & Media Sync in LMCE admin and manually added the individual VOBs, IFOs, etc into the media database, using LMCE DVD as the filetype. This did allow me to see the files under Videos but they won't play. I tried playing them with Xine from the KDE desktop but I get an error saying the format is not supported or CSSDVD isn't installed. Before someone says make sure that CSSDVD is installed, it is. I can play other DVDs fine that were ripped without any problems on this MD and play DVD disks.

So I tried some of the suggestions in this thread and it still won't work. I made an ISO of the VIDEO_TS directory using mkisofs -o name_of_file.dvd directory_of_dvd/ and this didn't work either. It makes the iso file perfectly but it says that the media type is unrecognized or CSSDVD isn't installed when chosen in LMCE under videos. I can play the ripped DVD files fine on the Vista computer so I know the files are ok.

I thought that LMCE was supposed to see the VIDEO_TS directory and recognize that the files under it were part of the DVD and show it as one file, but this never worked.

Problem solved for me. All I needed to do is use mkisofs with the dvd-video-dvd switch (not sure of exact syntax since I'm not at home). Do a mkisofs --help to see all the available switches. With this switch it recognized the VIDEO_TS directory structure. Playback of dvd very smooth. Also using DVDshrink I was able to remove spanish and french audio.